


shadowchaser

by Transient_Bard



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Gen, and without the coeurl's coffer, galvanization and dread, this is not quite dark but full of, what if rauffe but on the first
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 17:37:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20782490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Transient_Bard/pseuds/Transient_Bard
Summary: "You are not Forgiven."A short narrative of a warrior who refused to succumb to the Forgiven, and became something far more terrifying -- an unstoppable force.The shard's greatest one man army.





	shadowchaser

A militia of guardians of the last city. She swore her blade and blood to the pursuit of the light, to defend those that she held dear.

They came.

A battered, beaten squad of veterans, and more bodies, not people, returning from the conflict.

She persisted. No god that she heard of would allow a heresy like this to go unpunished.

A ragtag group of survivors, cut off from support as village after village grew overgrown, sunbleached, lifeless and brown.

She persisted. If not them, who else?

A scant few experts, family beyond blood to the ones they stood back to back with. The bodies of the Sin Eaters they fought were beginning to be too familiar to them, too much like the dead they put to rest.

She persisted. She had come too far to die and become one of them.

Two remained. Blades chipped and razor-sharp alike, bullets recovered and rehoused, bottles with dregs of ethers left in their bottoms. No support to be found. The area changed, the fight intensified, but the blades and bullets and bottles always got recovered. Ethers became dilute, bodies pushed past limits already long ago.

And yet, she persisted.

There was just her, now. The gaps in the sworn sister to her side would not mend, no matter how much energy and no matter how much recovery she attempted. The familiar sense of a specially kept blade severing routes of blood and breath upon the dying viera’s neck grew dull – too dull. Too oft repeated. The bodies of the enemy lay in heaps around them…

And yet… she persisted. There was no choice in the matter.

In time, the Sole Survivor would find the water that once brought her life, grew bitter upon her tongue. The finest of recoveries from the shores and lakes were growing stale in her mouth. Nothing but blade through Sin Eater flesh and sinew was bringing her any step closer to rest. Lacking aught to motivate her to keep stepping… she committed fully.

It was an oft-repeated phrase, to want to eliminate the accursed Forgiven from the face of Norvrandt, to bring a sense of normalcy to sun-bleached worlds full of accursed Light. How high her folly, how low they all fell. There was no normalcy to have anymore – there was just the remaining survivors, dwindling by the day, and there were the growing ranks of the monsters. No art mattered, no music or food mattered. One would have to win, and the other would be conscripted to history’s growing ranks.

So she would go. Fight them all, learn how to fight them effectively. Efficiently. Blades and bullets became one, magic and signs were mastered across all. It did not matter, in her eyes, _what_ she fought them with, so much as the maximization of efficiency – how to eliminate as many as possible with as little expenditure of effort and stamina as was required. The Sin Eaters would not grow well to reach the challenge she kept raising for herself – repeating rifles, guerrilla tactics, anything and everything she could scrape and barter and trade for. In this dead world, anything and everything was necessary. Soon, hordes of Eaters would be reduced to pieces against the bulwark of hot metal she formed whenever she traveled. 

But she would never stay at one place for longer than necessary, following the herd of monsters and their shepherd wardens. The smiles she once gave grew dim and few, words terse and clipped – less and less time to talk to the _cowards_ who hid behind walls and others’ swords, less time to waste when there were innocents being slaughtered and rendered into the enemy right before them, _how can you all not raise your hackles at this travesty and help in the smallest of ways_; she’d cry over a pint. The time was getting to her – she had long since forgotten the difference between days and weeks and months and years. All that she knew was that combat was to be her fate, chosen by her own hand.

And one time was all it took to bring her low. One Warden, one raid against a barely-sustaining village somewhere far in the north. 

…

Those that saw her from that point forward would turn their faces away as soon as she left. Ashen hair and skin, streaked with arcane runes that she swore would protect her against the influences. The color and spark drained, except for one thing.

“You are not forgiven.”

The only four words she spoke to anyone. She traded, bartered, worked. Still eliminated and scattered hordes. But disappeared as soon as the horde was gone. Retreated to some place out of sight and out of mind.

Wielding weapons both small and large, anything and everything against the hordes. She cared not about appearance, or standards. There was only the war, and there was only Her that would stem the tide. If not her, who else?

A name was whispered for her. A name that carried a curse upon its forecoming wind. When she came to a town, it was time to pack your things if you sought a comfortable and peaceful life – because either Sin Eaters by the score would taint the ground, or they would see the dead rise again and again until the former came to pass.

“Shadowchaser.”

It’s said that she chased after the horizon, in search of the dark side of the shard.


End file.
